


we'll come full circle (just not today)

by lalalyds2



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, I cannot say the same for raspberries, I promise though - no cherries or lemons, Sibling Incest, Spellcest, fandom please forgive me - I've wandered down A Garden of Bitter Fruit lane again, this one only meanders into hell I don't think we'll actually enter it, tw: homophobia similarities, vague mentions of punishment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2019-10-25 06:06:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17719550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalyds2/pseuds/lalalyds2
Summary: Intertwined. Completion.They cannot maintain this way.They fall apart as easily as they come together.But they do come back.It’s a rhythm they’ve learned too well to stop.





	1. Trout Heart Replica

It is not a start of urges.

It does not begin in summertime.

They kiss because Hilda is six and Zelda is eight, and you cannot play Happy Families without the father kissing the mother for goodbye, good night, good morning, good love.

Zelda is father, because obviously.

Hilda is mother, because surprise.

She wants a momma’s desire, and an apron.

“You can be the baby,” Zelda had said.

Hilda’s mouth went raspberry.

“I already am. Baby of the family,” clarification emphasized by her blowing a raspberry too. “It’s boring.” 

And so it goes.

Dolls play the babies, enjoy the deviance from their regular boredom on the shelf.

Zelda and Hilda make excellent parents.

Zelda makes the rules and Hilda makes dinner. Between them and their hypocrisy, the dolls will grow up spoiled and ever so happy.

Contentment is a bit of cream in imaginary tea.

Forewarning illustrious as pinafores cover porcelain, sisters bicker into habit, and mouths touch mouths.

 

~*~

 

Zelda and Hilda kiss like puppies bumping noses.

Like kittens causing rumpus.

Like growing up together.

Always with innocence, and intolerance at being ignored.

“Pay attention to me, mother.”

“I’m making dinner, father.”

“. . . That’s not a real stove.”

“It’s a desk. It can be whatever I want.”

“Still not real.”

Childish domesticity broken.

“Zelda, you’re not playing imagination right.”

Hilda not the only one who makes raspberries.

“Well I’ve got nothing to do.”

Hands reaching, little bodies colliding, Hilda kisses Zelda’s ruddy cheek in apology.

“How about, when I cook, you read the newspaper, hmm?”

Zelda is reluctant till she finds the comic section.

She finds she likes it quite a lot.

 

~*~

 

She reads the paper when she’s fourteen and Hilda is twelve, because Hilda is braiding her hair and it is very uncomfortable to sit on the ground.

Her back hits the wooden part of the couch, her arms perched up on Hilda’s knees.

When Hilda needs her to tilt her head back, she squeezes Zelda’s ribs.

Strong-thighed pixie, it is purposefully too tight.

Zelda will growl into the political op-eds, and Hilda will giggle and know revenge is coming.

When it is Hilda’s turn, Zelda’s knees stay together, her back will hit those knobby bones, and the braid will be so tight her scalp will sting, and Mother will coo because Hilda’s hair is never this neat.

 

~*~

 

They no longer play Happy Families, but they do kiss goodnight, because it is pattern.

It’s just a pucker of lips and an end to the day.

When they dream, it is of forests and twirling skirts and nothing at all.

 

~*~

 

Blood moon rising, Zelda meets fate.

Does not come home till the sun boils down and the summer intends to melt them all.

Hilda greets her in the meadow, arms folded in the unbearable heat.

Zelda’s baptismal gown is missing. She is scratched and bruising and smiling so wide.

Hilda is afraid her sister’s been replaced by some changeling.

It would explain why Zelda glows all unearthly and joyous.

Sweat glistens oily on milk-white skin, Zelda reaches for her.

She reaches back.

They do not touch.

“I’ve learned something new, sister.”

“ _I_ haven’t.”

“Shall I teach you?”

She does not understand why Zelda’s eyes grow quietly scared, or why her gut turns bird, swooping low and jubilant.

She nods, because the words are lost.

They tiptoe close, and she knows the world has hovered in pause.

Everything in wait.

Zelda kisses her, and it is different.

It is not a goodbye, a good night, a good morning, but it is a good love.

A good end.

It is an end to Hilda wanting anything else.

She opens her mouth to it, completion floods in.

They go down in the tall grass, insects and field creatures the only witnesses to this impromptu lesson.

And Zelda teaches.

Oh Satan, how she teaches.

 

~*~

 

Loving in secret is hard to do.

They hold hands under the table.

Edward raises his brow but doesn’t deign it important enough to address. 

They stay outdoors till the moon comes up, Hilda leaning against a tree, legs spread wide.

Zelda between them, leaning against Hilda, reading Charles Dickens aloud.

When teenage lust interludes, they drop the books. Hold something much more precious.

Returning home does not feel like it, they return to hiding.

Hiding not always successful.

They are against the wall, nearly chaste, when Mother finds them.

Her shriek signals an end.

 

~*~

 

Hilda has never hated a door so much as now.

She can hear Father’s belt swing.

 

~*~

 

Zelda won’t look at her when she stalks out the office, her stride limp.

Father shoves salt in the wound.

“Curb your appetite elsewhere!”

When he turns to Hilda, his eyes are softer.

She hates him for it.

“Praise Satan she’s not a man. You haven’t been defiled.”

 

~*~

 

Zelda is lying face down when Hilda creeps into the bedroom.

The air is red, wavering like a heatwave, issuing out a warning she doesn’t heed.

She only sees how Zelda’s shoulders tremble.

Her palm on them is a mistake.

“Don’t touch me.”

Her hands flutter, hovering an inch too close, an inch too far.

“I have some salve from grandmother’s last visit, I could—”

“No.”

“But—”

“I don’t want it.”

“You’re hurting.”

“I deserve it.”

Hilda’s heart twists.

“You couldn’t possibly.”

“What we did was wrong.”

“Unconventional, maybe. But wrong—"

“ _Yes_ , Hilda.”

Hilda’s heart on a spike.

“So. . . What do we do now?”

“There is no ‘ _we_.’”

She must be as stupid as her parents worry, because she touches Zelda again.

Has to, needs Zelda to understand how much that ‘ _we_ ’ means to her.

How much she needs to be _that_.

Zelda slaps her away, she is insistent. 

“Zelda.”

“Don’t.”

“Please.”

“I said _don’t_.”

She tugs at Zelda to look at her face and Zelda is hissing because her buttocks still burns and Hilda is aghast because her sister’s been crying and why hadn’t she realized and—

She tumbles to the ground.

Zelda straddling, so haphazardly on top.

Hands on her throat.

She is choking on the touch she asked for.

She looks up, eyes cerulean and swimming.

Zelda looks terrified.

Hilda knows it’s her fault.

All of it.

She is a bad sister.

The hands grow tighter, and she lets go.

 

~*~

 

She breaches ground, breathes air a second time.

Renewed life tastes acrid on her tongue, like mealworm and burning latex.

Zelda is watching from the porch.

Father watching also.

Hilda stumbles from the cemetery.

Father claps Zelda on the back, a congratulations.

Zelda’s nails dig deep into the wood banister.

Father goes back into the house.

Zelda stares at her.

She stares back.

Coughs out dirt.

A long moment.

Then Zelda too is gone.

 

~*~

 

Zelda goes to school.

Is not often invited home for the weekend.

Hilda sends her letters, words sloppy and uneven, evidence she is writing in the dark.

The words crawl off the pages, lodge jaggedly in Zelda’s ribs.

Affection hits.

Not gently.

She reads them only once, knows they’re still etched on her mind.

Sets the preciously damned paper alight.

Hovers over the candle after ash goes.

She watches her fingers singe, pulls back only when she can’t stand it any longer.

Flames do not work.

She cannot burn off this desire.

 

~*~

 

Hilda comes to school.

Her voice grates on Zelda’s self-control.

Zelda is cruel, because she cannot afford to be anything else.

The silence is worse.

 

~*~

 

She travels, Hilda studies.

She still receives letters, words crisp and written during the day.

Affection still hits.

Softer, tempered by age and neglected fantasy.

She reads them over and over. Covets them and keeps them under lace.

When tobacco goes trend, she rips up Hilda paper, rolls up written memory.

She inhales her sister’s promises, finally breathes like it's right.

It tastes nothing like Hilda.

It is enough.

 

~*~

 

She returns because Hilda asks.

Hilda is graduated and free and has utterly no clue how to indulge independence.

Zelda brings a present—the first in a long time.

A travel trunk, just like hers.

Hilda says yes before she’s got a word out.

 

~*~

 

They are in a dingy hotel, cloud breath close, shivering together because the winter works harder than their radiator.

Zelda swears the minute the England skies clear, they are going to Australia.

Hilda huffs. Mint invades Zelda’s senses.

They’re holding hands, something they haven’t done since happy bickering dissolved to battling deaths.

It is more desperate than she remembers.

“Hilda,” her whisper is too soft.

She cannot go louder.

“Yes?”

Her sister, always a chirper, even when sleepy.

“Why do you let me. . .”

She cannot finish the question.

Puts a scarlet-tipped fingernail to Hilda’s throat, slides so careful not to cut this time.

Hilda’s thought rumbles in her throat. 

She feels the vibrations. And goosebumps.

Her hands are so cold.

“I don’t _let_ you do anything. You just do it.”

Zelda swallows hard.

“And when I used to. . .”

Scarlet goes down the throat, down the sternum, rests gently above rising breasts.

Hilda sighs.

“That one, I asked for.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

There is no breath in this space.

Only anticipation, jelly tension, and something glimmering like hope.

Scarlet goes back to the throat, hand around vocal chords.

Zelda now above her, straddling like before, haphazard like before.

Poised to kill, but there’s no Cain pit in England.

The danger is very real, and neither knows what it means.

“Even still?”

Hilda shrugs.

The act so mundane, it can only mean truth.

“It seems my love never learned to be conditional.”

The hand is tight, but Zelda is leaning over.

Their breath mingles more.

Hilda can almost taste that viper mouth.

“I am a bad sister.”

The words ghost against her lips.

She licks them.

“You and me both.”

Completion.

They are finally, blessedly, warm.

 

~*~

 

They cannot maintain this way.

They fall apart as easily as they come together.

But they do come back.

It’s a rhythm they’ve learned too well to stop.

When their parents stop breathing, they are on the outs, because guilt gets its grip back in Zelda and Hilda won’t apologize for sucking her own fingers when eating strawberries.

They return home and Edward is happy to see them.

He notes the distance between their hands, smiles ever wider.

 

~*~

 

He is High Priest. Not surprising.

He has a daughter. A little more so.

He has a mortal wife. Surprise through the roof.

When his plane falls from the air, the sisters fall together.

They cannot afford guilt or distance anymore.

It is either love and clinging or falling into that abyss named empty.

Neither of them could survive the absence.

 

~*~

 

The baby reminds her of Hilda.

Happy Families, deluxe.

 

~*~

 

They do not realize the dangers of mortal education until the day Sabrina comes home and asks where babies come from.

Hilda drops a pan. Zelda bites her cigarette.

They haven’t been midwives in decades.

Had over a century of practice between them, yet in all their experience, they have never explained conception to such a tiny tot.

Satan save them, the clinical descriptions do not satisfy Sabrina.

Eventually Zelda says babies come from mud, because she is tired, and Sabrina is imploring and cannot even pronounce the word _genitalia_ , and Sabrina finds the explanation enough.

She says it’s evidence then, that women can have babies together.

They ask what she could possibly mean.

She looks at them, exasperated to hell or heaven, and says that’s how they must have made her.

Guilt is lightning on a sunny day.

Sabrina’s forgotten her parents.

They have failed their brother.

Zelda gently reminds Sabrina she is not theirs, not in the way she thinks.

Hilda gets the family album.

Zelda doesn’t touch her for months.

 

~*~

 

They are together again when Sabrina comes home to regale them on history lessons and European politics.

Zelda zones out from behind Die Zeit. 

Until Sabrina mentions royal inbreeding, scrunches her nose.

Zelda freezes.

Sabrina calls it disgusting.

Calls it wrong.

Skips up to her room, does not understand the scope of her actions.

Does not know she’s decimated over two centuries of beltings and blamings and brutal necessity.

Doesn’t realize she’s assassinated something no one else could ever damage before.

She does not comment as to why Aunt Hilda wakes up from the ground the next morning.

Innocent, ignorant little bird, she watches her aunties fester and cannot ever understand why they were wounded in the first place.

 

~*~

 

It’s the longest dry spell they’ve had since their days at the Academy.

Unseen arts, indeed.

Hilda gets excommunicated, Zelda gets laid.

Nobody seeks out punishment the same.

As long as it hurts, it continues.

Sabrina is not getting wiser with age.

She is content in her doll-hood of spoiled happiness and self-righteous greed that she can have two opposing worlds without suffering consequence.

She is so headstrong, so utterly teen, so innately Spellman.

Zelda is proud, but running on a very thin, very final thread of sanity.

Hilda is so far gone.

She is smitten on a mortal man.

And no matter how much Zelda mocks or teases, or swears she smells dog on him, Hilda will not let him go.

Zelda looks back through her memories of sisterly hand holding.

She cannot remember if Hilda was this adamant, this tenacious when with _her_.

She is still gritting her teeth to the thought when Hilda comes home, humming and shaking her hair out from that wigged atrocity. 

Their eyes meet across the foyer. 

Chill settles.

Zelda thinks of clutching fingers under a cheap hotel duvet. 

“What’s wrong, love?”

Question shatters resolve. 

Zelda is upon her like candlelight, instant and warm and ready to burn. 

Hilda pressed into the stairs, body titillated, chest heaving. 

Zelda above, not touching her, not yet. 

“It’s been so long.”

“ _Zelda_. . .” If this whine is her tactic to calm them both down, it is heinously misjudged. “We can’t.”

Zelda licks her lips. Hilda suppresses a shiver. 

“I can’t kiss you, won’t kill you. What am I to do?”

Her eye roll surprises them both. 

“You’re the problem solver, Zelda. You figure it out.”

Hand to her throat, she is so used to it now.

The cords of her neck clench, anticipating.

“The problem is you, Hildegard.”

The stairs are starting to make her back ache. 

“What’s my problem?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

Zelda’s hair tickles her nose, she could sneeze or giggle. 

Instead, she longs for more. 

“Then ask me a different question.”

“Am I a bad sister?”

Zelda’s mouth is so red. It glistens, near. 

She stares. 

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to be good?” 

“Yes.”

Mouth hovers closer. She can practically taste it — Zelda’s smile.

“Then beg me for it.”

She reaches up, lips crash down.

“ _No_.”

All this time, Zelda still teaches her things.

Oh Satan, how Zelda teaches. 

 

~*~

 

Sabrina comes home. 

Her shriek signals an end.

Like a nail in a coffin, this one feels final. 


	2. Hate Me Soon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i initially had this plotted out  
> and then i really Went Through It  
> and then i wrote something completely different :3  
> perhaps with too much self-projection  
> but now!! it's finally finished!!

 

The faucet is dripping out of sync with the kitchen clock.

Drip _tick_.

Drip _tick_.

Diptych.

Sabrina, one end of the kitchen table.

Zelda, Hilda, steeled on the other.

The tableau stilted and formal.

No one addresses. 

No one can.

Sabrina gets up.

Doors slam.

Zelda gets up.

Lock clicks quiet.

Hilda stays.

Rain weeps on window panes.

Slip, drip _tick_.

Slip, drip _tick_.

Still, Triptych.

Separation on every level.

 

~*~

 

Morning brings no clarity.

Mourning brings nothing.

Hilda alone in the kitchen.

She has not moved at all.

 

~*~

 

Sun filters through cloud and greenhouse glass, hits particles like prism bites.

Solarium sanctuary.

Hilda spritzes belladonna.

Cannot hum to her green leaf children.

She worries, waters, wrinkles.

Zelda slips in on quiet heels, snipping the only plant she cares to know.

“Headache?” Hilda guesses.

Zelda breathes out mint breath.

Clipped shoes clop in.

Sabrina, arms behind the back, fidgeting betraying a neutral stance.

“Aunties.”

“Sabrina.”

“I’d like to talk to you about last night.”

The sanctuary splinters.

 

~*~

 

Kitchen brighter now.

Just as stilted. Just as formal.

Sabrina’s fingers fold gently before her.

Still trembling, white-knuckled.

Hilda’s fingers twist apron strings, circulation cut and aching.

Zelda sucks a hand-rolled cigarette and doesn’t breathe out.

“First, just know I love you both. Always will.”

Air goes out like smoke.

“ _But,_ ”

The catch was always coming.

Still hits with serrated edges.

“I’m conflicted.”

The sisters wait in separate chairs, breath baited.

Anticipating.

“I want you to be happy.”

Then torrent of true feeling.

“But does this feel wrong?”

Hilda’s “no” is quiet and immediate.

Zelda says nothing.

Belt buckle memory swings.

If Hilda turns her head, she will see a lip tremble, a fist clench, penance preparing.

If she sees flame, she will reach for it.

Will get burned.

She should not look.

She does.

She reaches.

Zelda’s chair screeches back.

“Thank you for your honesty, Sabrina.”

It feels final.

Hilda feels buried.

A long moment.

Then Zelda is gone.

Sabrina turns to Hilda in confusion.

For clarification. For comfort.

For forgiveness.

One big, ugly moment — she doesn’t want to.

Anger burbles like water over rough stones.

But water always moves past, and so does she.

She clutches her niece, cares not to squeeze too tight.

Sabrina is always hers.

Doesn’t matter how much it hurts.

“I didn’t mean for that,” Sabrina mumbles into Hilda’s cardigan. “I was genuinely asking. Does it feel wrong to you?”

Neck tendons stretch tight as Hilda looks to the ceiling for answers.

“Does it feel wrong to hold your breath?” She asks instead.

“What?”

“How long can you hold your breath?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

Hilda releases her niece, smiles because it’s painful.

“Because you don’t have to.”

Sabrina’s nose scrunches.

“So Aunt Zee is like holding your breath?” 

“No, my love. She _is_ my breath.”

 

~*~

 

Time passes crookedly.

Sabrina maneuvers around Zelda.

Zelda maneuvers around Hilda.

Ambrose maneuvers around them all.

He is quiet and opinion-less, other than to comment he will not shape the morality of anyone other than his.

But she’s always known that he’s always known.

His winks have never wavered.

She isn’t sure what that means.

But Sabrina is still hesitant, and Zelda won’t let her back into their room.

Everything speaks volumes.

Silence drowns.

She putters in the kitchen louder.

Every noise a tiny violence.

Clattering spoons a war raged against isolation.

Proof she doesn’t exist in void. 

It works when her eyes are open.

 

~*~

 

Closet history is hard to move.

Dresses dressing depression.

Hilda surrounded in cotton and color and polyester and plaid and florals and flounders because she’s flailing under fabric.

She’d only meant to grab Monday’s outfit.

Figured it’s time to move the rest out too.

She cannot remember how her clothing scattered.

Zelda finds her this way.

Stuck in the past and tight pants.

So very lost in the eyes.

“Despite our recent history,” her voice husks. “I will not be cleaning up this mess of yours.”

Pause so long, she doesn’t expect a reply. But then —

“Is that what you called it, that dismissal in the kitchen. _Cleaning up_.”

Hilda so hoarse.

Zelda kneels and folds laundry.

“I did what was best. For everyone.”

“Not for me.”

Hands reach for same green cardigan.

Zelda draws back.

Hilda clenches, misses intentional accident. 

Eyes no longer lost — seething, seeking.

“Don’t I get a say?”

Zelda sits back on her heels, lips tight and suppressing.

“No. You heard our niece.”

“Zelda, she didn’t mean —”

“I know what she meant.”

“She’ll come around.”

“She won’t have to.”

Hilda gapes. Brims. Spills over.

“This isn’t something you get to choose by yourself, and I have a right —”

“Sabrina is our responsibility. Hilda. There is no choice. I won’t have her grow up ashamed simply because we were being selfish.”

The words hang in the air, poison or rope or believed truth.

No matter the metaphor, they both choke.

“Don’t. I love that girl too. Don’t you dare use her against us.”

Zelda looks at Hilda.

Hilda looks back.

She knows a death blow coming when she sees one.

“There is no us anymore.”

 

~*~

 

“You’re a bad sister.”

“I know.”

 

~*~

 

Zelda home late, a static of mussed hair and tender limbs.

Her heels hold a wobble.

Her lipstick a smudged gash.

Hilda waits for her with a cup of tea.

Splash of bourbon, salve for bruises.

A wounded animal, Zelda snatches up everything and retreats upstairs. 

“You promised you wouldn’t anymore.” Said quietly to her wilting and welted back.

“I’ve promised too many things. Some were bound to be broken.”

“But not promises to _me_.”

Zelda is in Hilda’s space internal within seconds.

“Don’t make me break another.”

She is near her door, her familiar prison, when that penetrating quiet is spoken again.

“You deserve better.”

 _You deserve me_.

Her answer hoarse, whether from past guttural evocations of erotic, or something that holds so true it shakes her very essentia.

“I do not.”

 

~*~

 

She all but shoves Hilda into that mortal’s polyester-clad arms. 

She still thinks he smells of dog.

She still thinks he moons too much.

She still thinks no one will ever deserve her little sister.

Herself included.

So she bites her tongue, asks Hilda to bat her lashes.

Careful with her barbs and eyeshadow brushes.

It is crucifixion to give Hilda up — give her away to someone so unworthy.

To make her up so someone else can muss her away.

When Hilda isn’t looking, she clenches fists till little crescent moons bleed into her palms.

Exhales sparingly.

“Chin up,” Zelda instructs.

Hilda complies, breath rattling from her ribcage like a leaf in a fussy gutter.

“I’m nervous,” she exposits, as if her big sister can’t name all of her emotions blindfolded.

“It’s simple,” Zelda brusque, eyes resolute on her powder palette and not meeting Hilda’s hazel.

“He will buy you dinner. He will be boring.”

She gestures, Hilda’s eyes scrunch. She taps them with a brush till her nose scrunches instead, but the lids settle smooth.

“You will get a little drunk. He will probably say your snort is cute and you will probably believe him.”

Hilda makes noise, but Zelda’s smoking her eyes into drifting star vapor, so she doesn’t squirm.

“You will go home with him. Make some kind of half-hearted and grunting sex which he will call making ‘love.’ And he _will_ be wearing a condom.”

“Zelds!”

The gasp she wants happens.

She doesn’t grin, but relishes the scandal bouncing around on Hilda’s lineaments.

“It’s non-negotiable, sister.”

Hands go up to cover embarrassment, pause before smudging makeup.

“Must you be so spartan about — _well_ —”  

“Yes.”

She puckers Hilda’s lips, spreads dark cherry cream.

Lingers.

“There. You’re ready.”

She doesn’t release Hilda’s face.

Hazel eyes open to hers.

A kaleidoscope of concupiscence.

It’s so desperate.

She’s no better.

“What happens. . . after?” Hilda whispers.

Her face rests soft and gentle in Zelda’s palm.

Fits perfectly within yearning fingers.

“After?”

Mouths only a hair’s breath away.

The invisible tether always tied between them pulls close together.

If she kisses Hilda now, it will be another end.

It would be so good.

It would be devastating.

She already knows how Hilda tastes.

“After, you will come home.”

 _Come home to me_.

The words scald on back of her throat.

She coughs, yanks away.

“You’d better get going.”

Then it’s Hilda who’s gone.

Zelda’s gone bereft.

There is a thin line between the sacred and the profane.

There is a thin line between wanting to leave and being left.

There is a thin line between Hilda and Zelda.

It will be her fault when it eventually severs.

 

~*~

 

The moon starves high up, bathing everything under it with bone light.

Zelda is watching from the porch.

Father’s rage hangs spectral over her shoulder.

Zelda’s nails dig deep into the wood banister.

Clutches tighter a recently emptied decanter.

Hilda shuffles into view, sliding into light like Venus emerging.

Looks up, watches her watching.

“Well?” Zelda bites out.

She is a snarl.

A bleeding creature.

A damaged lover.

There is no gentle way out.

Hilda shrugs to it.

“It was nice.”

Crystal shatters as the decanter nearly hits tired feet.

Hilda just sighs.

“We talked.”

Zelda’s heel a stomp down the stairs.

“We drank.”

They’re on the same graveled playing field.

Still, Zelda towers.

“ _And?_ ”

The question so dangerous soft.

They both wonder where Hilda will wake tomorrow morning — above the earth or down below.

“That’s it.”

“Satan’s sake.”

There is relief between them.

There is strangulated hope.

“Will you _never_ move on?”

Hilda’s scoff reverberates.

“Will you _never_ let me?”

“What was this, if not that?”

“An exercise of will. And we both lost.”

Zelda turns, a flurry of hair and harrowed thinking.

Her feet a metronome of loss up the stairs.

“Whatever, Hilda. I’m tired of trying. Teaching. You never learn anyway.”

“I have learned one thing.”

She pauses, because as much as she’s tried, she can’t ever truly ignore Hilda.

“It’s never been choked out. By anyone. Not even you.”

The sigh hangs in the air like a fleeting truce.

“And what’s that?”

She turns, and it’s Hilda’s eyes on hers.

Eons spread between gazes.

Lifetimes of constants and distance and orbit.

“You are it for me. There’s no one else. Never will be. Might as well get used to it.”

Zelda descends.

Hilda rises to meet her.

 

~*~

 

“I am a bad sister.”

“Only because you’ve always been so much more.”

 

~*~

 

Zelda’s hair spreads out on their shared pillow, a tangle illustrious.

Her fingers tangle Hilda’s.

This is what it means to breathe.

 

~*~

 

“What about Sabrina?” Zelda whispers into the night, snatched by shadowing guilt.

“She’ll only feel ashamed if we teach her to be.”

“We already live in a world that doesn’t love us.”

“Then aren’t we lucky to live in a world where you are not always right.”

“Hilda, be serious.”

Her hand clutched tighter, she is kissed with comforting promise.

“The world changes every day, Zelds. We are bad sisters, we make even worse enemies. We deserve better than what we’ve had and we deserve worse than what we’ve gotten. It all matters and none of it matters and only one thing has ever held true for me.”

“And what is that?”

“I will always circle back to you.”

 

~*~

 

Morning brings clarity.

Mourning brought to an end.

Hilda holds Zelda’s hand in the kitchen.

Sabrina grins tiny and asks for blueberry pancakes.

Breath held in is let out.

The day changes in its entirety.

They know the cycle is starting, but the difference feels singular.

Is surpassing.

This time, they know the inevitable eternal.

The circle will come in full.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope this didn't hurt too much!  
> i honestly can't tell  
> don't worry, the next thing i write will not be so personal :3  
> thank y'all so much for your patience  
> kisses and kudos for your willingness to wait xx

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not sure about this one tbh.  
> a lot of it is a bunch of filler till i got to the lines i wanted, and then more filler till we get to the next chapter.  
> whoops. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> comments/criticisms welcome!


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